Resulting from largest beta in SAP’s history – Design Studio will GA in Q4
The beta for SAPBusinessObjects Design Studio (project named Zen) was the largest in SAP history. Largely because of the positive feedback and success of this beta, it has been decided that Design Studio will dispense with the ramp up program and be Generally Available (GA) directly upon release in November this year.
Note for those not familiar with SAP’s release terminology: Normally SAP’s process is once the software is Released to Customer (RTC) it goes into Ramp-up which is SAP’s standardized market introduction process. During ramp up it is available only to a limited number of customers. In order to exit Ramp up to
become Generally Available (GA) certain KPI’s must be met which include 10 live customers and 0 escalations.
Going GA right away is a strong testament to how successful the beta has been – we know we have the customers ready to go live as soon as we move out of the beta. There are a number of reasons our customers are so excited about adopting Design Studio. With Design Studio, IT will be able to easily create dashboards and BI apps that can handle large data volumes and complexity to provide the business users with a holistic, trusted view of their business – tailored exactly to their requests and your unique business. IT will also be able to reduce costs and maximize their BI investment through the capitalizing on the reuse of already defined analysis and assets all while enabling their executives to make better informed decisions.
Design Studio allows developers to create flexible and intuitive design of dashboards to BI apps and sophisticated OLAP applications. Everything you create can be mobilized as there is out-of-the box iPad support. Additionally it is optimized for big data having native connections to BW and HANA. You are able to leverage existing BI and analysis assets by reusing BEx queries, InfoCubes and HANA views. The designer itself is intuitive as it is WYSIWYG Eclipse-based and a HTML5 UI.
For more insight into Design Studio catch some of the tutorials at: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE66EE0738962B0BF
Stellar and congrats. Looking forward to see it.
Any news which connections/data sources will be supported in the initial release (e.g. SAP BW, SAP HANA, etc.)? And timelines for availability of further data sources (such as Universes, etc.)?
Hi Anita,
I'd really love to join your enthusiasm but I'm going to be honest.
After the webinar on the future of SAP Dashboards, my expectations of SAP Design Studio were quite high. In this webinar the expectations were set that the new product would be the convergence of the Web Application Designer and Xcelsius.
I've been able to participate in the Beta but what I've seen so far, doesn't really live up to this expectation from a design perspective. For example, simple features like customizing the labels of the X-axis is quite difficult. Determining the exact color of graph elements (not using predefined themes), bars or other items also look like a challenge. This doesn't sound user friendly to me. The default themes and basic product features just make to many design choices for me which I cannot undo or change, without many effort.
Also the used charting engine, which seems to be inherited from Webi, doesn't really make datavisualisation or dashboard designers happy.
If SAP wouldn't have stated that this would be the next dashboarding tool, I would have been more enthusiastic but for now, I tend to just wait for the HTML5 functionality for Xcelsius because in Xcelsius I am able to make design choices to a certain level that is still unmatched in any other available SAP product.
I really hoped that this would have been Xcelsius 2.0 which could set the standard for other vendor products, but for now I'm a bit disappointed.
Please prove me I'm wrong..
As far as the Beta version goes we discussed in the webinars, I agree with Pieter here. I am very curious to see GA version though.
Additionally on Pieter's remarks on design, I am very curious for the amount of code that would go into more complex dashboards. In the beta examples that were shown in the webinars, large amounts of code were used for several cases (like filtering on more than one characteristic). I wonder if SAP has made this more user-friendly and less code-dependant in the GA version.